Texas’ Jackson Lee casts hypocritical vote for police state snooping

Most of those votes were quixotic protests against bills certain to pass.

But when she actually had a chance to cast a vote that mattered yesterday, a chance to restrict surveillance to where it is warranted, she abandoned her long-held position, and opposed a bipartisan amendment to end the National Security Agency’s blanket collection of phone records.

The amendment by Reps. Justin Amash (R) and John Conyers (D) of Michigan would have ended the NSA’s collection of records, including phone calls, of people unrelated to any investigation.

The 10 votes in favor mark a stark change for the state GOP. In recent years, Texas Republicans have done almost nothing to slow the expansion of the surveillance state, as Watchdog.org has reported.

Former Rep. Ron Paul is the only Republican to have opposed surveillance expansion consistently. A half-dozen Texas Democrats have opposed one surveillance measure or another, but only Jackson Lee and Lloyd Doggett, along with former Rep. Charles Gonzalez, opposed it consistently.

Along with Doggett, the Democrats to support Amash were Gene Green (who’s voted this way in the past at times) and freshmen Filemon Vela, a former federal judge, and Beto O’Rourke, whose father was a judge.

Jon Cassidy is the Texas bureau chief for Watchdog.org. He also writes a weekly column on politics for The American Spectator. He was formerly a reporter and editor for The Orange County Register in California and a reporter at The Hill in Washington, D.C. His work has been published by Fox News, Reason, The Federalist, Human Events, and other publications. He is a 2014 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and a graduate of the University of Southern California. He and his wife Michelle live just outside Houston with their two children.